A Safe and Secured Medical Textual Information Using an Improved LSB Image Steganography

Abstract

Safe conveyance of medical data across unsecured networks nowadays is an essential issue in telemedicine. With the exponential growth of multimedia technologies and connected networks, modern healthcare is a huge step ahead. Authentication of a diagnostic image obtained from a specialist at a remote location which is from the sender is one of the most challenging tasks in an automated healthcare setup. Intruders were found to be able to efficiently exploit securely transmitted messages from previous literature since the algorithms were not efficient enough leading to distortion of information. Therefore, this study proposed a modified least significant bit (LSB) technique capable of protecting and hiding medical data to solve the crucial authentication issue. The application was executed and established by utilizing MATLAB 2018a, and it used a logical bit shift operation for execution. The investigational outcomes established that the proposed technique can entrench medical information without leaving a perceptible falsification in the stego image. The result of this implementation shows that the modified LSB image steganography outperformed the standard LSB technique with a higher PSNR value and lower MSE value when compared with previous research works. The number of shifts was added as a new performance metric for the proposed system. The study concluded that the proposed secured medical information system was evidenced to be proficient in secreting medical information and creating undetectable stego images with slight entrenching falsifications when likened to other prevailing approaches.